ABSTRACT
The last few decades have witnessed scholarship that has argued that the category ‘woman’ has been produced in a mediated and metonymic relationship to the nation, drawing from a discourse on patriarchal protection and patronage. Frozen as symbols and tied to the nation as mothers, wives, and daughters, women became even more vulnerable to gendered violence that arose from the twining of the female body and the honour of the family/community/nation. The fixing of territories as the ‘motherland’ is not just an affective gesture but rather a deeply political act, which freezes both land and women as static ‘objects’ to be possessed, guarded, and defended and never to be allowed any subjectivity. The introduction, thus, building on earlier queries, asks some specific questions. Given that the relationship between gender, culture, and politics is rearranging itself and women are increasingly ventilating, voicing, censuring the ideological construction of the nation: do these utterances spell the death of the nation (imagined as the Hindu, upper caste, middle class, heterosexual, able-bodied Indian mother)? Or does it lead to its re-imagination? Is feminism emerging from the shadows into the mainstream? Do contemporary feminist articulations presage new and powerful connections between movements based on intersecting inequalities?
